What’s New (and Awesome!) in WordPress 4.7

What’s New (and Awesome!) in WordPress 4.7

WordPress 4.7 was only recently released in December and numerous user experience and developer, not to mention Twenty Seventeen, a brand new default theme.

If you haven’t already checked out this new version of WordPress, here’s what you need to know.

Introducing the Twenty Seventeen WordPress Theme

Work began on Twenty Seventeen shortly after last year’s theme, Twenty Sixteen, was complete and now we can reap the rewards. Twenty Seventeen is a theme that aims for simplicity while introducing a host of advanced features that showcase the powers WordPress has been endowed with since Twenty Sixteen.

The most noticeable of these features is the video header. You can now add MP4 videos, which will be used as header media, looped infinitely. This brings a widely-used feature to a core theme which is an important step in embracing more than just images as media.

Otherwise, the theme is pretty standard. I personally like it more than Twenty Sixteen, but I still favor Twenty Fifteen for its minimalist, yet effective approach.

The Twenty Seventeen default WordPress theme in action.

Twenty Seventeen does a great job of showing off some under-the-hood features. If you head over to the Customizer in the WordPress admin, you’ll see the editing guides – a welcome addition that allows you to click on what you want to modify, instead of guessing where the appropriate setting can be found.

In-place editing in Twenty Seventeen – a cool new addition.

Twenty Seventeen has a host of customizations available, just to name a few highlights (from the WordPress Codex):

Multiple sections on the front page, selected in the Customizer

A striking asymmetrical grid

Custom color schemes, built on top of a monochromatic foundation, and adjustable via a hue picker

Different headline placement for pages, changeable in the Customizer, via theme options

A great experience in many languages, thanks to language-specific font stacks

User Experience Changes in WordPress 4.7

I’m extremely happy to see UX front-and-center, which has been a great tendency in recent WordPress development. We’ve already taken a look at the Customizer editing guides, which will take you to the controlling setting with a single click.

So what else is there in store for us?

Navigation Menu Building

I set up new test sites fairly frequently and making the menu is always a pain. My preferred method would be to map out a site structure using the menu, but until now this wasn’t really possible.

As of WordPress 4.7, you can now create a new page from the menu builder, making the site building process that much easier.

Creating a new page from the customizer

Custom CSS

I’ve been waiting for a custom CSS feature to be built into core for years. Almost all premium themes contain it and we use it for most tutorials where we touch the UI. Having a custom CSS box in the Customizer at all times is a great help for everyone.

Custom CSS is a new feature in the WordPress Customizer.

User-Specific Backend Language

Users can now select their preferred language. This is a great feature for websites employing an international crew. Everyone can now work in their own language, regardless of the site’s main locale.

The new user language selector feature in the WordPress admin.

PDF Previews

This minor change will be a Godsend to those of us using WordPress for business purposes, perhaps even as a documentation engine or a place to store bills and other paper-based documents.

PDF previews now work just like image previews, you’ll be able to distinguish between documents a lot better from now on.

Minor Post Editor Changes

My favorite change in WordPress 4.7 is something very minor: the headings dropdown has been moved to the top row. In my eyes, this is the most telltale move because it shows a deep understanding of how content is created and action has been taken to make it easier.

Previously you needed to have the additional options open to switch between headings. This has now been placed in the top bar, along with the keyboard shortcuts needed to switch heading levels.

Now you can select headings from the top bar of the editing area in the Post Editor.

Image Search By File Name

This one has been a pet-peeve of mine for ages. Once you upload an image you can’t change the file name, yet you can’t search by filename. This glaring omission has finally been addressed and you can now find your media by filename. Yay!

Changes For WordPress Developers

Aside from numerous bug fixes, there have been a ton of additions for the developers out there.

REST API Content Endpoints

Yet more functionality has been merged into core, making the WP REST API a truly useful tool for maintaining a website, not just as a tech-demo for the future. Posts, comments, terms, users, meta, and settings have now been added to core allowing developers to do so much more right out of the box.

Custom Bulk Actions

You can now register custom bulk actions on post list pages. Beefing up the CMS aspect of WordPress is always a welcome change in my book. You can now have custom actions like sending a list of posts via email, setting a custom post status and so on, built right in.

Learn more about custom bulk actions at make.wordpress.org (and we’ll have a post about it soon, too).

Post Type Templates

Page templates have been available for a long time. They’ve been put to good use by developers creating media galleries, about us pages, custom front pages and more. You can now create templates for each custom post type.

This could cause unnecessary headaches for developers who misuse it to create hoards of templates, but it could also make some websites’ life a lot easier.

A gaming website could use a post type template to create posts about a game pre-release, another template for the main review once released and yet another for a full walkthrough for example.

Learn more about post type templates on make.wordpress.org (and in an upcoming post right here on WPMU DEV).

WP_Taxonomy

A new WP_Taxonomy class has been shipped with WordPress 4.7, changing the global $wp_taxonomies to an array of WP_Taxonomy objects. The get_taxonoomy() function now also returns an instance of this class.

This is probably the first step in implementing further improvements to the taxonomy system, I’m eager to see what is built on this new, stronger foundation.

WP_Hook

The underlying hooks system has been overhauled completely. This should weed out some known issues while making the system more robust and manageable. Most developers won’t be affected by the change, unless you manipulate $wp_filter directly.

Customizer Changesets

Not being able to easily collaborate during development is an issue all developers face. Tools like Github already exist for coding together but site setup is an entirely different beast. Changesets will make the process a little easier.

“Customize changesets make changes in the customizer persistent, like autosave drafts. Users can make changes to one theme and switch to another in the customizer without losing the changes upon switching. A customizer session can be bookmarked to come back to later or this URL can be shared with someone else to review and make additional changes.”

For now, this feature is only available through the query parameter in the URL but UI implementation is planned in a future release.

Daniel builds plugins, themes and apps – then proceeds to write or talk about them. He's the editor for the WordPress section at Smashing Magazine and he writes for a bunch of other online magazines. When not coding or writing, you'll find him playing board games or running with his dog.

5 Responses

Every year I look forward to WPMU DEV’s review of the new default theme; it’s like a January Xmas encore! This year more so with 4.7’s new features. I’m most excited to learn the REST API, followed closely by Post Templates and working more with the Customizer. Got a whole lot to learn before Twenty Eighteen!

Hello @Daniel thanks for compiling all features.
I would suggest not to upgrade directly to WP 4.7 on a live site. There are many incompatibilities related to themes and plugins. One should test on staging site first.

Hello,
I recently did an upgrade to WordPress 4.7. Before doing so, it’s better to make an audit of all the plugins active on you WordPress site and check all the compatibilities regarding you active WordPress theme. Don’t forget to make a copy of your current site and the database.